In Darkest England and The Way Out [37]
For all these people have children, although they have no homes in which to rear them. Not a bird in all the woods or fields but prepares some kind of a nest in which to hatch and rear its young, even if it be but a hole in the sand or a few crossed sticks in the bush. But how many young ones amongst our people are hatched before any nest is ready to receive them?
Think of the multitudes of children born in our workhouses, children of whom it may be said "they are conceived in sin and shapen in iniquity," and, as a punishment of the sins of the parents, branded from birth as bastards, worse than fatherless, homeless, and friendless, "damned into an evil world," in which even those who have all the advantages of a good parentage and a careful training find it hard enough to make their way. Sometimes, it is true, the passionate love of the deserted mother for the child which has been the visible symbol and the terrible result of her undoing stands between the little one and all its enemies. But think how often the mother regards the advent of her child with loathing and horror; how the discovery that she is about to become a mother affects her like a nightmare; and how nothing but the dread of the hangman's rope keeps her from strangling the babe on the very hour of its birth. What chances has such a child? And there are many such.
In a certain country that I will not name there exists a scientifically arranged system of infanticide cloaked under the garb of philanthropy. Gigantic foundling establishments exist in its principal cities, where every comfort and scientific improvement is provided for the deserted children, with the result that one-half of them die. The mothers are spared the crime. The State assumes the responsibility. We do something like that here, but our foundling asylums are the Street, the Workhouse, and the Grave. When an English Judge tells us, as Mr. Justice Wills did the other day, that there were any number of parents who would kill their children for a few pounds' insurance money, we can form some idea of the horrors of the existence into which many of the children of this highly favoured land are ushered at their birth.
The overcrowded homes of the poor compel the children to witness everything. Sexual morality often comes to have no meaning to them. Incest is so familiar as hardly to call for remark. The bitter poverty of the poor compels them to leave their children half fed. There are few more grotesque pictures in the history of civilisation than that of the compulsory attendance of children at school, faint with hunger because they had no breakfast, and not sure whether they would even secure a dry crust for dinner when their morning's quantum of education had been duly imparted. Children thus hungered, thus housed, and thus left to grow up as best they can without being fathered or mothered, are not, educate them as you will, exactly the most promising material for the making of the future citizens and rulers of the Empire.
What, then, is the ground for hope that if we leave things alone the new generation will be better than their elders? To me it seems that the truth is rather the other way. The lawlessness of our lads the increased license of our girls, the general shiftlessness from the home-making point of view of the product of our factories and schools are far from reassuring. Our young people have never learned to obey. The fighting gangs of half-grown lads in Lisson Grove, and the scuttlers of Manchester are ugly symptoms of a social condition that will not grow better by being left alone.
It is the home that has been destroyed, and with the home the home-like virtues. It is the dis-homed multitude, nomadic, hungry that is rearing an undisciplined population, cursed from birth with hereditary weakness of body and hereditary faults of character. It is idle to hope to mend matters by taking the children and bundling them up in barracks. A child brought up in an institution is too often only half-human, having never known a mother's love and a father's
Think of the multitudes of children born in our workhouses, children of whom it may be said "they are conceived in sin and shapen in iniquity," and, as a punishment of the sins of the parents, branded from birth as bastards, worse than fatherless, homeless, and friendless, "damned into an evil world," in which even those who have all the advantages of a good parentage and a careful training find it hard enough to make their way. Sometimes, it is true, the passionate love of the deserted mother for the child which has been the visible symbol and the terrible result of her undoing stands between the little one and all its enemies. But think how often the mother regards the advent of her child with loathing and horror; how the discovery that she is about to become a mother affects her like a nightmare; and how nothing but the dread of the hangman's rope keeps her from strangling the babe on the very hour of its birth. What chances has such a child? And there are many such.
In a certain country that I will not name there exists a scientifically arranged system of infanticide cloaked under the garb of philanthropy. Gigantic foundling establishments exist in its principal cities, where every comfort and scientific improvement is provided for the deserted children, with the result that one-half of them die. The mothers are spared the crime. The State assumes the responsibility. We do something like that here, but our foundling asylums are the Street, the Workhouse, and the Grave. When an English Judge tells us, as Mr. Justice Wills did the other day, that there were any number of parents who would kill their children for a few pounds' insurance money, we can form some idea of the horrors of the existence into which many of the children of this highly favoured land are ushered at their birth.
The overcrowded homes of the poor compel the children to witness everything. Sexual morality often comes to have no meaning to them. Incest is so familiar as hardly to call for remark. The bitter poverty of the poor compels them to leave their children half fed. There are few more grotesque pictures in the history of civilisation than that of the compulsory attendance of children at school, faint with hunger because they had no breakfast, and not sure whether they would even secure a dry crust for dinner when their morning's quantum of education had been duly imparted. Children thus hungered, thus housed, and thus left to grow up as best they can without being fathered or mothered, are not, educate them as you will, exactly the most promising material for the making of the future citizens and rulers of the Empire.
What, then, is the ground for hope that if we leave things alone the new generation will be better than their elders? To me it seems that the truth is rather the other way. The lawlessness of our lads the increased license of our girls, the general shiftlessness from the home-making point of view of the product of our factories and schools are far from reassuring. Our young people have never learned to obey. The fighting gangs of half-grown lads in Lisson Grove, and the scuttlers of Manchester are ugly symptoms of a social condition that will not grow better by being left alone.
It is the home that has been destroyed, and with the home the home-like virtues. It is the dis-homed multitude, nomadic, hungry that is rearing an undisciplined population, cursed from birth with hereditary weakness of body and hereditary faults of character. It is idle to hope to mend matters by taking the children and bundling them up in barracks. A child brought up in an institution is too often only half-human, having never known a mother's love and a father's